Bush guided by 9/11

I get the feeling that Cathy Young's essay on Bushophobia [October 9: "Loathsome: Bush-haters' vitriol runs big risks"] was written before the war on Iraq, seeing as there is no mention of that defining action of George W. Bush's presidency. But I'm not sure, because Young makes another big omission that cannot be explained by publication date.

Reading the piece, one would never guess that a cataclysmic event took place after Bush took office. Yet 9/11 is inseparable from the evil alter ego that the far left has created for Bush.

As long as she is reproducing "preposterous" claims from each side, it is disingenuous for Young to give the impression that the left's charges stop at, or even center on "Nazi ties" or the death of a senator. The reality is that not only has the Bush administration faced sharp criticism and official inquiry for an allegedly passive role in 9/11, it also stands accused by the far left of an allegedly active role in the WTC attacks.

At the risk of lending a misguided notion credence through repeated reference, it should be pointed out that this belief is routinely expressed at rallies in cities like San Francisco and Portland. It informs much of the programming on the public radio stations owned by Pacifica.

I do not believe any charge even remotely on the same scale has ever been leveled at former President Bill Clinton, who comes off, at worst, as an immoral thug capable of lying under oath about matters graver than sex.

It's true that a lot of the popular rhetoric from the left, such as comparisons of Bush to the Antichrist (also from a rally), is a tit-for-tat reaction to the Bible Belt mentality of many of Clinton's accusers.

But the anti-Bush movement extends so far beyond our borders, and the actions of the administration have been so different from Clinton's, that I wonder if the comparison is sound. Germans, who have less of an ax to grind about the "stolen election" and tend to consume German-language media, a third of young people recently polled believe the US was behind the 9/11 attacks.